Technical Communication

This is a blog where I want to share my experiences as a Technical Writer. Just like we experience many things in life which we wish to record somewhere. Likewise, I wish to share them here.

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Location: Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India

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Friday, January 07, 2005

My STC Paper Presentation

It all started very casually. Somewhere in September 2004, I came to know about the Paper Proposal contest for STC Annual Conference. So, all of us in my team at VisualSoft decided to send proposals for the competition. Luckily, my proposal got selected. As result, I got an opportunity to present a paper to an international gathering to Technical Writers, Instructional Designers, Illustrators, Writers and Editors. I had to send my completed paper by October 15. After knowing it, I started taking it seriously and kicked-off my research on the subject. I was relying mostly on Internet as a source of Information. I browsed hundreds of relevant and irrelevant web pages and downloaded whatever i felt was relevant. Then, began the process of filtering the content according to the outline I had earlier decided upon. All along this, i kept consulting my team members and checked with them that whether I was right track. It helped a lot in retaining the focus.

Finally, the paper was ready on October 15. I was happy but it was a short lived happiness as I came to know that I also needed to send the Powerpoint Presentation alongwith the Word Document.

I asked for some more time from the concerned people and started working on the presentation. In another 2 weeks, the presentation got ready. You must be thinking that it is pretty long time when the content is ready but whatever i was doing was supposed to my spare time activity. I had my official work with me, as well. I took a deep breath when i sent the powerpoint presentation for my paper. Now, I had a month to wait for the day when i would give the presentation.

The day came and i really gave the presentation. I was very thrilled about it right from the time when my proposal got selected. I was happy that i could do it. It was my first presentation to an audience like that. It went good and i got enough appreciation to keep me going.

Well, for your perusal, the presentation can be seen at the STC India website.
The URL is:
http://www.stc-india.org/conferences/2004/Presentations/QAIS-Impact%20of%20Accessibility%20on%20Technical%20Writing.ppt

My presentation was focussed on impact of Accessibility on Technical Writing. If you can spare some time, have a look at my presentation.

If you wish to read the paper as well, just drop me a mail at: qais.writer@gmail.com